Suggestible You by Erik Vance

Author:Erik Vance
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Published: 2016-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

In 1951, England was still recovering from the devastation of World War II. Young boys had to make toys from used munitions and playgrounds from the rotting hulks of buildings that still littered parts of the country. It was a hard place to grow up, and perhaps none had it harder than an unnamed 16-year-old kid who suffered from a rare congenital case of ichthyosiform erythroderma, which roughly translates to “fishlike skin.” The condition starts out as slightly tough skin that’s a little darker than normal. From there, it expands into lesions that the British Medical Journal describes as a “black, horny layer covering the entire body except for the chest, neck and face.” The young man’s lesions were hard, like fingernails, and especially thick on the boy’s feet, palms, and thighs; they constantly cracked and became infected, oozing a “blood-stained serum” whose odor nauseated not only him but his classmates as well. The parts that were not cracked and painful were completely numb. Because of his shocking appearance, pungent smell, and near constant pain, the boy had to be pulled out of school at a young age.

Some of the top plastic surgeons at the time attempted skin grafts from parts of the boy’s body that were not affected by the lesions. But every time they moved skin from a healthy part of the body to a diseased portion, the healthy skin became covered in the dark, horny lesions as well. When the surgeons gave up, the suffering young man was taken to a physician and hypnotist named Albert A. Mason, who saw this as a unique opportunity to document the power of hypnosis on skin conditions. So Mason treated just the boy’s left arm, hypnotizing him and planting the suggestion in the boy’s mind that his arm should clear itself of the painful growths.

After enduring 16 years of misery, in less than a week the scales on his arm loosened and peeled off, exposing soft, almost totally healthy skin beneath. The hypnotist next treated his right arm, then his legs, then the trunk of his body. After each treatment, broad swaths of the young man’s scaly dermis came sloughing off. His legs, which had been completely covered, dropped 50 to 70 percent of their lesions. His back, which had been only lightly covered, lost 90 percent. And his arms and hands, once covered in scaly growths, lost 95 to 100 percent of their lesions. Rarely does a scientific paper bring tears to your eyes, but it’s hard not to get a little misty when reading the August 23, 1952, issue of the British Medical Journal. Mason noted that this poor kid, who was once “lonely, solitary, with a hopeless attitude towards future friendship and employment,” suddenly became a “happy, normal boy” who went on to become an electrician’s assistant and then a bike mechanic with no sign of relapse.

Had it been a priest performing the hypnosis and not a doctor, it would be enough to make a person believe in God (or devise some wild explanation involving magnets).

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